Virginia Tech

It's already started.

At a press conference with the president of Virginia Tech and the Blacksburg, Virginia police chief yesterday, reporters already were looking for someone to blame. Should the college have been locked down after the first shooting incident? Did the police fail to react promptly? The talking heads on TV are already talking about banning guns and violent video games. A lot of people are blaming the general cultural violence and decay of moral values.

Everyone is hopelessly (irrationally?) searching for a rational explanation for an irrational act.

But crimes of passion happen every day. How many are followed two hours later by a killing spree? Almost none. So how were the police or college administrators to know that a love-sick student would kill his girl friend and another student, wait two hours, and then kill 30 more students? It was irrational. Unpredictable.

If guns are to blame, shouldn't it have been a good thing that the gunman was the only person with a gun? No, it wasn't a good thing.

If today's violent video games are the "desensitizing" agent that led to the killings, how do you explain Charles Whitman's rampage at the University of Texas in 1966?

In 1927, 45 people--mostly schoolchildren--were killed in Bath Township, Michigan, by a nut who didn't like his taxes. He used explosives, so we can't blame guns. There were no videogames, so we can't blame World of Warcraft. This was even before TV and before prayer was removed from schools, so we can't even blame the culture.

But we have to blame someone. Or something. Don't we?